Downton Abbey just spent a couple of hours telling me goodbye. We laughed together, remembered our dear friend Dame Maggie Smith, and walked away with a not-so-stiff upper lip.
I just watched Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and wanted to jot down a few thoughts about a series I truly loved. This isn’t a review of the movie—no spoilers to be had. It’s more of a thank-you note.
Downton Abbey is a very good example of art lifting.
Across its years, some really terrible things happened. Young husbands die. Young wives die. There are wars—of all the kinds… bullets, words, and dirty looks. We watch a beautiful, stately house, and a whole era of society, deteriorate before our eyes—and somehow we feel better for having watched it.
The entire series could be summed up in a line Harold Levinson says near the end (I’m paraphrasing because I literally just left the theater): “We’re told in America that we are the future and that England (Europe) is the past. But here at Downton I can’t help but think… It’s more comfortable to live in the past.”
It’s like he restates the series’ mission statement right at the very end.
Let’s not debate the truth of that sentiment in real terms. Let’s instead think about how that statement feels. I’ve said that a romance novel’s main job is to make readers feel something. Of course, lots of other genres have the same job.
Downtown reminds us that the past almost always feels more comfortable than the future. Safer, better… bigger in our minds than it was in reality.
The series reminds us that the past almost always feels more comfortable than the future—safer, better, bigger in our minds than it was in reality. We tend to aggrandize the good and minimize the bad. That’s what Downton Abbey did for the tumultuous era at the turn of the twentieth century. It didn’t ignore the bad. It hit us with it—in all its terribleness. But it also showed the wonderful, beautiful, amazing small things happening in the cracks and crevices of the big things. Life filling in like moss in an old house’s mortar.
It took all of the pain, heartache, and unfairness of the time and let us look at it from a hundred years in the future—to see it from a distance and let the sharp edges be lovingly worn and polished down to a soft reflected glow of the past.
And we feel a bit sad… and a bit satiated.
Art. Lifting.
Thanks, DA.
